The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [49]
Looking down the stairway from the entry room
“What the fuck, Kinsey?” whispered an out of breath and out of shape Newmeyer.
“Ssshhh, shut up, I heard something.”
We all listened intently. Not a sound.
“Goddammit, Kinsey!” sighed an exasperated McGeorge. “Newmeyer’s fat heart can’t handle this shit!”
I laughed, Newmeyer scowled, and we started walking down the steps again.
At the bottom was a sign warning about asbestos. “Weird,” I said, as the other guys nodded in agreement.
We opened the door and found ourselves in an empty hallway. Another door was on the left, and the right seemed to open out into a tunnel… The Utilidors! We turned right, walked down to the tunnel and stopped short. Passing by us were Goofy, without his head on, his flamboyantly gay “handler” who was talking to him “in character”, and Snow White, who Goofy was heavily flirting with.
“Now Goofy,” intoned the handler with a high-pitched lisp, “I don’t want to hear any of that sort of talk!”
Goofy grabbed Snow White’s ass as well as he could with his huge padded hand. She gasped and punched him in the nuts. He laughed, obviously protected by the costume’s padding, and tried to grope her left breast. She sighed and kissed him.
The handler continued to blabber on. “Goofy, that sort of behavior simply isn’t appropriate! Mickey is going to punish you when he gets home!”
They walked past the tunnel entrance, and we glued ourselves to the wall as they went by, going completely unnoticed.
“What… the… fuck?!” I murmured. It was like some crazy alternate reality down here, like we really had gone down Alice’s rabbit hole.
“Let’s follow them!” said an overly excited McGeorge. “Snow White is hot!”
Seemed like a reasonable plan. We certainly had no idea where we were going, so why not follow people who did? We stepped out into the tunnel… and nearly got run over by a battery-powered golf cart silently barreling down the middle of the walkway.
“Watch where you’re going assholes!” yelled the driver.
Shaken but undeterred, we continued onwards, following Goofy and his two admirers. Journey’s “Separate Ways” played through the speakers overhead, followed by Bryan Adams’ “Summer of 69”. No Disney music down here, assumably to offer a respite to the Cast Members from the constant barrage of it in the park overhead. Although whether Bryan Adams was a sanity-saving alternative to the Sherman Brothers was certainly debatable.
The Utilidors under Fantasyland
A wide variety of Cast Members passed us, costumed, half-costumed, or in street clothes, completely oblivious to our presence. It was like we were invisible. So we kept walking, even when our Goofy-led escorts turned off and went up a random stairway. The one-foot wide stripe painted along the wall of the tunnel eventually changed color, and after stopping to stare slack-jawed at a full-color version of our ASCII map on the wall, we ascertained that this meant we were entering a different “land”, in this case going from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland.
“Hey, I just realized something,” I said, turning to the guys. “We had a hell of a time finding this one entrance. It’d be a lot easier to find them by coming out of them rather than trying to track them down from the outside.”
“Yeah, good idea!” exclaimed McGeorge.
“I agree,” said Newmeyer. “That’ll save a ton of time. Let’s go up the next stairway we see.”
So we did, and on the way up a group of Cast Members going down the stairs squeezed past us. We nodded to them and continued on, still stunned that nobody seemed to care that we were down there. At the top of the stairs we were greeted with a scattered mess of clothing racks, filled with t-shirts ticketed with ridiculously marked-up price tags. Boxes piled high along the walls were filled with stuffed